Colorado State football wants to reflect and learn

Rams concerned with Rams during bye week

By Mike Brohard Sports Editor

Posted:
09/30/2013 07:09:19 PM MDT

Colorado State's defense celebrates the third-quarter safety that helped turn the tide in Saturday's 59-42 win over UTEP. The game gives the Rams something to reflect on heading into the bye week. (Steve Stoner)

FORT COLLINS -- Before the season began, Jim McElwain broke it into three sections for his Colorado State football team. The first part is over, and while a 2-3 record falls short of where the Rams expected to be, McElwain does feel good about where they sit heading into the second phase.

"I do," McElwain said at his Monday press conference. "I think they're in a good spot to maybe reflect and reflect on reasons why something happened or something didn't happen, and I think that is what we need to do a really good job of, and as we reflect, let's get it corrected."

That's what this bye week is all about. Colorado State will spend a lot of time on Colorado State, while also trying to get the players a chance to get healthy and rested up for the Mountain West campaign.

In terms of being able to reflect, Saturday's win over UTEP gives the Rams a perfect case study.

The game itself was very Dickens-esque for the Rams. They enjoyed the best of times early and the worst of them in the third quarter, but bless them all, they were able to sing the fight song with the crowd when it was all said and done, an adventure of a 59-42 win.

"What I think it really did was show us, again, what we're really capable of and what we're capable of, it that makes sense," McElwain said. "If we're not willing to have that mindset from start to finish ... Being able to overcome negatives I think is huge. I thought we did that, but it also showed when we're not right on the attention to detail, you're going to give up some explosive plays.

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"You've got to compete. You don't know when the play is going to occur. There will be a lot of good learning from this film on both sides of that."

Linebacker Shaquil Barrett, who earned the Mountain West defensive player of the week award after his 13-tackles, three-sack performance feels the lessons out of that game will prove valuable on many fronts.

It took the Rams an entire half to build up a 28-7 lead, but it only took the Miners 6:59 to tie the game up. The bouncing back part was great, Barrett said. The fact they had to was a different matter.

"We ended up having to overcome adversity," he said. "All that stuff like that will make us a stronger team, a better team. We know that we can overcome adversity and fight back, even when we shouldn't have been in that fight in the first place. It speaks a lot about our team and our players on the team."

The Rams will practice Tuesday through Thursday, with each day lasting a little bit longer than the last. After running and lifting Friday morning, McElwain will give his team the weekend off. But during those three days of practice, they have to be willing to fix some issues that leave them at the 2-3 mark they carry.

"I think on offense, a lot of the things that we need to do are going back to the details of little things like splits," he said. "Proper hand placement in the run game up front, the details of the catch and the transition thereafter.

"Defensively, we need to continue to work on our pass rush up front, more so from the standpoint of keeping contain. We're starting to head into a phase now where we're going to see some quarterbacks who can hurt you if you're not disciplined in your lanes. We had pretty good lane distribution outside, and this last week we gave up that interior pocket. If we do that to some of the other guys, they're going to run crazy on us. I think it's pretty important we handle that."